Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., right, and former Republican Leader Bob Michel, R-Ill., attended a news conference on the formation of the Center Aisle Caucus. Formed by Reps. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and Tim Johnson, R-Ill., the Caucus will be and inter-party group of House Members committed to promote mutual respect and discourage personal attacks and achieving a more respectful and civil climate in the House.
Photo: Tom Williams, Getty

Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., right, and former...

Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., right, talks with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., during a ceremony in Statuary Hall where Foley was honored with the Capitol Historical Society Freedom Award.
Photo: Tom Williams, Getty

Former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., right, talks with...

Former House Speakers, Jim Wright, Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, and current Speaker Dennis Hastert join hands after participating in "The Changing Nature of the House Speakership."
Photo: Tom Williams, Getty

Former House Speakers, Jim Wright, Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, and...

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., right, talks with former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, before President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber, Feb. 24, 2009.
Photo: Tom Williams, Getty

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., right, talks with former...

Mansfield Foundation's Chairman Thomas Foley (C), US ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer (R) and Mansfield Foundation's board of director member and former US ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale (L) walk into the prime minister's residence prior their meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in Tokyo on April 14, 2006.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images, Getty

Mansfield Foundation's Chairman Thomas Foley (C), US ambassador...

Thomas Foley, former speaker of the House; in the Ronald Regan building for the 9/11 Public Discourse Project discussion on "Congressional Reform for the Post-9/11 Era."
Photo: Chris Maddaloni, Getty

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledges the applause May 14, 1992 after he addressed members of the U.S. Congress in the Capitol Building. Gorbachev asked the U.S. to consider Russia "a good and reliable partner" for its foreign policy. Standing next to Gorbachev is Speaker of the House Thomas Foley.
Photo: DAVID AKE, Getty

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledges the applause...

The American ambassador to Japan, Tom Foley, leads the the St. Patrick`s Day parade held in Tokyo, Japan, March 14, 1999. An estimated 2,500 turned up to watch the Irish parade . (Photo by Barry Cronin)
Photo: Barry Cronin, Getty

The American ambassador to Japan, Tom Foley, leads the the St....

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

Tom Foley, the Spokane judge's son who became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is dead.

His wife, Heather, confirmed his death Friday morning in an email to seattlepi.com. Foley, who had been in declining health, was 84.

Foley will be remembered as speaker of the House in days when Congress still got things done, but never saw the speaker's chair as his life's greatest honor.

Instead, it was that voters in Eastern Washington chose him for 30 years to represent them in Congress.

Foley stood tall (6'3"), gave straight answers and saw his job as working out society's compromises. He kept at it even as polarized times gave vent to a politics of personal destruction. He would, in 1994, be the first speaker defeated for reelection in 134 years.

"Big Tom" would come back to serve as U.S. ambassador to Japan, calming tensions over Okinawa and smoothing relations between two close allies with very different cultures.

The person who now hold's Foley's seat, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., has literally written the book for GOP colleagues on how to pack town meetings back home and manipulate questions to pre-chosen themes.

Foley never did that. He would show up in Colfax or Asotin or Walla Walla, field questions from all comers. He would not leave until the last wheat farmer with export questions, or high school senior writing a term paper, had received answers.

Foley took his job seriously, but never himself. He could find amusement even in such drag-out battles as forging the bipartisan coalition with which the House approved the North American Free Trade Act.

Others to hold House leadership -- Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and John Boehner come to mind -- have pursued power like rats in heat. Foley found himself sought out by colleagues for fairness and even temperment.

"There's an awful sense of chance in public life," Foley once said. "It's something that plays a much bigger role than anyone realizes. The other side of that is, you have to take advantage of the chances offered."

Recognition can be fleeting. As a freshman congressman, Foley was once summoned out of a waiting room at Dulles International Airport, with a passenger representative breathlessly saying Lyndon Johnson was on the line. The president suddenly realized that Foley wasn't the guy whose arm he wanted to twist, cussed and hung up the phone.

Foley was the son of Spokane County Superior Court Judge Ralph Foley, his mother part of a pioneer Lincoln County family.

He launched into politics in 1964, taking on entrenched 22-year Republican incumbent Rep. Walt Horan. The young lawyer, an aide to Sen. Henry Jackson, barely made it to the state Capitol to file for Congress.

He established a reputation for civility from the get-go. After upsetting Horan, Foley threw a reception for the man he defeated.

"I am not a suspender-snapper," Foley would joke. He wore a suit even at such events at the Down River Days parade in the remote hamlet of Ione. A local handyman with a cocked eye asked for a word with Foley in Ione.

"Your father once put me in jail," the man told Foley. The congressman cautiously drew a breath, then heard the guy say: "He damned well straightened me out."

A light plane carrying Foley was once forced to make an emergency landing in a cut-over northeast Washington wheat field. As a startled farmer drove up, the immaculately clad congressman climbed out of the plane and extended his hand in a classic politician greeting: "Congressman Foley. Glad to meet you."

Foley was elected to a Congress rigidly ruled by seniority, its committees chaired by conservative Southerners with life tenure.

He quietly worked with a few fellow reformers -- Richard Bolling of Missouri and California's Phil Burton -- to open up and democratize the institution. The arrival of "Watergate babies," a huge crop of Democratic freshmen elected in 1974, provided a path to power.

The House Agriculture Committee was tops in the alphabet. Democrats voted out Chairman W.R. Poage and made Foley chairman. Foley had supported retention of Poage, but found himself with power at the ripe young age of 45.

Foley became a craftsman of food-safety legislation and worked to overhaul the federal food stamp program -- a target, nearly 40 years later, of ultraconservatives in the House.

The "Gentleman from Washington" did not lose his roots, but expanded his reach. He developed a fascination with the cuture of Japan, advocating expansion of U.S. exports rather than slapping tariffs on Japanese goods.

He was a dedicated Anglophile, dressing in Saville Row suits and joining Europe-based, global think outfits (e.g. the Bilderbergers) suspected as world-dominating conspirators by right-wing paranoids back home.

Unheroic virtues -- patience, tolerance, forbearance -- lay behind Foley's rise in Congress, to House Majority Whip, then House Majority Leader and finally Speaker after Jim Wright resigned in a 1989 mini-scandal. He rose by acclamation in the Democratic leadership.

But he acquired a no-nonsense partner in 1969 marrying Heather Strachan, lawyer daughter of a foreign service office, at a ceremony in Sri Lanka. Heather Foley became the unpaid chief of staff to her husband, assuming thankless tasks as a kind of chief administrative officer while her husband worked policy.

Heather Foley loathed the limelight, staying away from the Washington, D.C., receptions that her husband had to attend. Foley was chauffered to work each day. His wife drove to the Capitol in an old blue Cadillac with dog Alice.

Heather Foley had a few close friends, notably celebrity biographer (and Spokane native) Kitty Kelley. The couple became close, lasting friends with Democratic fundraiser Pamela Harriman, who would become U.S. ambassador to France in the Clinton adminsitration.

Heather Foley was and is a person of strong opinions. Once, at a House Democratic Leadership meeting, she asked Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill to put out his cigar. "We tolerate you here," O'Neill snapped, then snuffed out his stogie.

The Foleys were never the easiest fit in conservative Eastern Washington, particularly when a Democratic president was in the White House.

Big Tom was a top committee chairman, but won reelection by a bare 9,000-vote margin in 1978, and barely survived the 1980 Republican landslide in which Ronald Reagan ousted Jimmy Carter.

Foley was faulted by eastern Washington's beleaguered left for not being liberal enough. The Inland Empire Public Lands Council got on him for not supporting enough wilderness preservation.

Still, he guided legislation that created a Hells Canyon National Recreation Area on the Snake River. The bill was bitterly opposed by the Washington Water Power Co., the reactionary Spokane-based utility (now Avista) that wanted to build a 600-foot-high dam in North America's deepest canyon.

Foley anchored his right flank, for many years, as a defender of gun rights and ally of the National Rifle Association.

But a traumatic incident in June of 1994 shook him. A mentally unstable Air Force enlisted man went on a shooting rampage at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, killing five and wounding 22.

Foley relented. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, legislation banning the sale of 27 different varieties of semiautomatic assault rifles. (The ban would expire under the Bush administration and was not renewed.)

The National Rifle Association came gunning for him in 1994. It committed $300,000 to defeat Foley: NRA President Charlton Heston came to Seattle for a fund-raiser (he wouldn't travel to Spokane). Foley lost to challenger George Nethercutt by fewer than 4,000 votes.

Foley was a person of intelligence, decency, geniality and -- when occasion demanded -- steeliness.

During the furor over busing to achieve school integration, a sweeping, radical and poorly written anti-busing amendment faced a vote by the House. Members were tempted to vote for it to guard their backsides.

Sitting with Foley at the Monocle, a Capitol Hill watering hole, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., fretted over which way to vote. Foley assumped full height and boomed: "Norm, you're a lawyer!! You know this is bad law!!! You are going to vote AGAINST this!!!!"

The House could see moments of genuine drama, such as in debates and close votes in the 1980's when the Reagan administration wanted to arm Contra guerillas fighting to topple the Marxist-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

In booming voice, Foley would close debate for the "No" side. He would be followed, with equal volume and passion, by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Illinois, urging approval of the aid.

The House was still a civil home -- then. Foley and Hyde, two big Irishmen, would walk off the floor, arms slung over each other's shoulders, when it was over.

The two men, Democrat Foley and Republican Hyde, would later join in mounting a successful (but politically costly) federal court challenge to Washington's state initiative that sought to limit members of Congress to three two-year terms.

Foley has been succeeded by House speakers of far less stature, ethics and ability. A telling anecdote:

As Foley was about to become House speaker, in 1989, some Republicans began a whisper campaign that Tom Foley was gay. One GOP operative went so far as to send out a release under the title: "Foley -- Out of the liberal closet."

House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich walked up to Foley on the House floor, and earnestly disclaimed any responsibility. I don't fight that way, Gingrich told Foley.

Foley knew full well that a senior Gingrich aide was spreading the rumors. He held stayed silent. Still, Foley related later, the lie from Gingrich was so brazen that he felt the tingling of blood leaving his face.

The example of a Foley standing tall should be remembered at a time when the House is led by men who could hide in a field of stubble.